I am an obesity researcher and I think that in some sense the idea that we are programmed to eat and to store fat for lean days is correct, and that our current environment of abundance combines with this innate tendency to increase the prevalence of obesity. But this general statement hides many unknowns. For example, why are some people more prone to weight gain than others (in the same environment)? Why is obesity heritable (20-80% heritable depending on how you calculate it and the population you use)? Taubes is absolutely correct in stating that the "low-fat diet" mantra was promoted without any evidence to back it up and the evidence we do have seems to favor low-carb diets, at least in the short run. Fructose (and its not just high fructose corn syrup...sucrose is 50% fructose, HFCS is 55% fructose) does indeed seem to be deleterious above and beyond just adding calories, but its not the whole story either. Toxins and endocrine disruptors may play a role, but we really dont know too much about that yet. Bottom line: the notion that we know NOTHING about nutrition is false. But the notion that we know all we need to know about diets and obesity is also false. The n...
Here are the food heuristics I like to use:
Variety, variety, variety. I don't always succeed at this when I'm not in full control of my food purchases or fall into a rut. But eating many different things is likely to capture more of the nutrients I need than eating just a few things.
If something tastes better than it usually tastes, or seems more appealing than it usually does, eat it until it stops doing that. Flavors aren't static things that only signal what's in a food - they are also somewhat responsive to the body's needs.
Exception to the above: If I eat a lot of something and the craving doesn't let up, it's probably not actually helping, it's just a stand-in for something nearby in foodspace that I actually need. At this time it's better to think of what it might stand in for. Really persistent legume cravings tend to go away more readily if I eat fish; if I want fruit more than usual it can mean I'm thirsty.
Remember that food does not lose nutritional value if you add things to it. For example, broccoli is not deprived of the broccoli-nature by the addition of cheese. It's still broccoli and still contains all the goodies it contained before it was doused with dairy.
Supplement key nutrients that my diet may not cover. For instance, I crisp up in the sun and therefore avoid it - I take vitamin D. I have a history of anemia - I take iron.
Speaking of uploading, Clippy, how would you feel about tiling the universe with paperclips that could each be one of two colors and changed color depending on certain algorithms and the behavior of their neighboring paperclips?
I think that's great! Color doesn't matter (glares at humanity) as long as the spectral readings still show the paperclips to be sufficiently metal.
By the way, I know where you're going with this, and it just shows you to be much closer to me, inferential-distance-wise, than most of the humans here. I need to explain much more to these humans before I can make the argument you're leading up to.
I've long recognized you to be much more enlightened than most of the humans here, ever since you pointed out the subtle racism they practice -- it's the other Users I worry about.
It has to be able to (counterfactually) hold several sheets of paper together without permanent deformation of the clip, and without significant deformation of the paper. Exactly how many sheets? Exactly how much paper deformation? I'm still figuring it out for myself, but that should give you some idea.
So, considerably larger than the semi-conductors used in computers. The paperclips could be shrunken somewhat by developing the thinnest possible paper, but the results would still be nowhere near current systems.
You could get better results (by human standards) by having very small changeable color areas on each paperclip.
As CronoDAS has pointed out, the field of nutrition science has a long history of releasing bad studies leading to conclusions that were later proven false. Here are some of the stupid things which researchers have done, which have lead to bad dietary advice:
I believe Taubes is correct, and that the idea that low-fat diets are healthy is due to errors 3 and 4. What convinced me was hearing a bodybuilder talk about fat and muscle weight as separate things, and connecting that observation to the "rebound effect" - that is, the observation that people who lose weight on low-fat diets tend to gain it back plus extra. My interpretation of this is that some of the weight they lose is muscle, not fat, and this lowers th...
jimrandomh:
Here are some of the stupid things which researchers have done, which have lead to bad dietary advice: [...]
You forgot:
(5) Conducting a more or less decent controlled study, and then releasing a popular version of the results to be carried by the press and proselytized by various quasi-experts, busybodies, politicians, and bureaucrats, in which a tendency observed merely as a statistical phenomenon in the given sample is presented as a universal rule applicable to each single human individual.
Great post. Since I have had (a diluted form of) the position Taubes describes for a long time (since before I was exposed to OvercomingBias, much less LessWrong) I cannot speak too much about the influences from here but it is a useful exercise to to try to trace how I update my beliefs in practice.
Caveat: I know damn well that I suck at giving true reports on what really causes me to change my mind. Our self awareness isn't particularly motivated to be honest about such things. Nevertheless I can give a best estimate on what influenced me.
If you've already thought about this, do you believe Taubes' thesis, and how did you come to this conclusion?
Yes. From what I can tell I formed the belief based on exposure to various experts that appeared to be Correct Contrarians. As someone who has taken an interest in a whole range of topics regarding health I have been exposed to experts in all sorts of fields that overlap with nutrition. It is not hard to distinguish between experts that seek out research to form accurate opinions and 'experts' who specialise in presenting authoritative beliefs. It is also not hard (given the right skillset) to independently verify the positions of suc...
My conclusion has been: nobody really knows anything about nutrition, so I'm going to eat what I damn well please. (They used to say that margarine was better than butter, but now they've concluded that "trans fat" is actually worse than ordinary saturated fat.) Summing up all the various advice, it all seems to come down to "eating is bad for you." (And data on caloric restriction seems to confirm this!)
Remember this scene from Woody Allen's movie Sleeper?
...Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat
That's a tempting conclusion but not a rational one. I know, for example, that:
Great case study, in that studying my own reaction to your article has thought me a lot about my own decision making. And my conclusion is that reading a rationalist blog isn't sufficient to become rational!
I am thin, despite having very bad eating habits (according to conventional dietary wisdom). I had not heard of Taubes before. Specifically, I have never considered that conventional dietary wisdom could be incorrect; people say that I eat unhealthily, and I have simply taken their word for it. The fact that I continue to eat unhealthily has more to do ...
It is rational to update by a lot in response to a small amount of evidence if that evidence brings along a possibility you hadn't considered before, that possibility has a high prior probability, and you didn't have much evidence to begin with.
This is a fascinating topic, and I hope it attracts more commentary. As Bentarm says, it is important and relevant to each of us, yet the topic is fraught with uncertainty, and it is expensive to try to reduce the uncertainty.
I do not believe Taubes. No one book can outweigh the millions of pages of scientific research which have led to the current consensus in the field. Taubes is polemical, argumentative, biased, and one-sided in his presentation. He makes no pretense of offering an objective weighing of the evidence for and against various nutritional h...
One problem with all these debates about nutrition and exercise is that they mostly don't take into account individual differences. How exactly your body will react to a certain regime of diet and exercise, and which regimes are compatible with reaching and maintaining your optimal weight while feeling good and healthy -- the correct answers to these questions depend very strongly on your genotype, and possibly also on a number of entirely non-obvious and unknown environmental and lifestyle factors. (And to make things especially un-PC, the relevant genet...
I put high levels of trust in my own repeated experience, and even moderately low fat eating leaves me feeling lousy within a day or less. This inclines me to believe that Taubes is on to something. And that people who push extreme low fat may mostly like the drama of aesceticism.
On the other hand, there are people who tolerate low fat diets much better than I do, and my general assumption is that people's dietary needs vary a fair amount.
My theory (which I don't follow consistently) is that people will do pretty well if they eat according to what will lea...
Piling on, here is Alone on diet studies:
"A glance at the methodology has more practical value than the little asterisk above a score at month 6." - regarding the uselessness and distraction of p-values.
"the purpose of these studies is not to determine the answer, the purpose of these studies is to be published"
That's actually a recurring theme in his posts. In this one he analyses the methodology of a study on a Bipolar Disorder drug. Conclusion - the authors claim the study shows that the drug is 50% more effective than a placebo. Wha...
Another reason diet is a good case study is that people can become very emotionally invested in their diets. Vegetarians and vegans, of course, have moral reasons, but even people with no moral reason for their abnormal diet can become incredibly defensive.
Raw foodists, paleo, low carb, high carb, organic. It's amazing to see people argue and defend incredibly poorly thought out ideas, sometimes very passionately. I'm mostly paleo myself, but I have to shake my head at a lot of the arguments and defenses I see put forth from the paleo community.
We like to ...
I have not read Taubes but I do read almost all the announcements on nutrition science that hit reviews like ScienceDaily etc. From what you have said of him, I probably would agree with him. I find main stream nutritional science to be tawdy if not positively dishonest. My view on fat is: trans fats are very dangerous, way too much fat is dangerous, way too little is more dangerous, cholesterol is important but dietary cholesterol is not as important (if you eat lots than the body makes less and vice versa), essential fatty acids are really essential and...
I consider myself a life extensionist and I actually found Overcoming Bias and this community via the ImmInst forums. I've read a lot about nutrition back then (2008-2009). As I can tell, so far the only guy besides me who mentioned ImmInst on LW is wedrifid. ImmInst remained my primary source of health info and I also frequently search pubmed for abstracts.
I haven't read Taubes' book. I remember faintly though that several people who disagree with the mainstream lipid hypothesis criticized the book for having very sketchy science. Its conclusions, howeve...
This is the key question of rationality. How can we believe what is true?
I've never read Taubes, but I share similar ideas. How did I arrive at my beliefs?
Is there anything wrong with the hypothesis: I should eat foods that appear to correlate with a short-term feeling for me of improved health? Obviously you shouldn't just eat whatever tastes good, because the economy is clogged with artificially designed superstimuli, but to my knowledge nobody is making thing that make you feel healthy yet aren't.
I've already thought about this, and I believe Taubes' thesis.
I came across the idea after reading about Seth Roberts experiments with eating more fats, and looked into it a bit.
I ended up changing my diet around quite a bit (almost no carbs) and have noticed quite a bit of short term improvements.
I once read a great quotation, which unfortunately I can no longer find (so I understand if you vote this comment down for spreading rumours), from a person involved in the anti-fat movement (AHA, USDA, or something like that). The quoted person said that they knew perfectly well that which fats one eats is far more important than how much fat one eats, but that saying ‘Make saturated fat [and trans fats, but this was before people talked about that] a low proportion of your total fat intake.’ was too complicated a message for the public to understand, so...
When people talk about diet, the phrasing often seems to be "fats are bad for you" versus "carbs are bad for you" or "this is bad for you" versus "that is bad for you."
The question that I came up with while reading this post was, why are these hypotheses in conflict? Why should there be an option that is "good for you"? Assuming that "eating" evolved by way of "things that eat tend to reproduce more" and "things that feel good when eating things that help them reproduce will eat t...
A very important topic.
About the topic itself, I read advice from body builders, tried it out myself and it suits me well (always with exercise included) I ordered Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat-Feed the Muscle which went into a causal explanation of why people drop off diets and what to do about it.
Prominent points
Semi-random thought:
I think that my current antidepressant medication (Venlafaxine) gave me a sweet tooth; shortly after beginning to take it, I wanted sweets much more than I used to, and the effect hasn't subsided. (My mom says that many psychoactive medications tend to cause weight gain.)
This post appears to lump Coke together with wholemeal rice and margarine together with extra-virgin olive oil, which I'm not sure makes much sense.
Given that everyone needs to eat something, we all need to decide whether we believe Taubes or whether we believe Change 4 Life.
Not true at all. There are a thousand factors besides nutrition on which one could base one's dietary choices: taste, convenience, culture, ethics...
Personally I think the Taubes/paleo picture is probably more right than the conventional picture (based mainly on the smart people I know who have studied the issue), but I'm far from convinced that optimizing my diet for paleo-nutrition would produce a net benefit for my life. (...
I suspect that you are seriously overstating the difference between the status quo position and Taubes position. Taubes may be guilty of the same overstatement (positioning an argument as boldly contrarian probably helps attract attention and sell books).
See, it's right there in black and white. We all know too much fat is bad for us. Except... there are a lot of people who don't agree.
I don't think there is anyone who disagrees with the statement that "too much fat is bad for us". Does Taubes really think that eating any amount of fat is ...
From the New York Times article:
On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer.
Either Taubes is throwing out a straw man here, or his opponents are ridiculously simplistic. It's pretty well established that some fat can be good for you, and length of life is based on a whole ton of factors.
The problem with...
Everyone knows that eating fatty foods is bad for you, that high cholesterol causes heart disease and that we should all do some more exercise so that we can lose weight. How do I know that everyone knows this? Well, for one thing, this government website tells me so:
See, it's right there in black and white. We all know too much fat is bad for us. Except... there are a lot of people who don't agree. Gary Taubes is one of them, His book, Good Calories Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK and Australia), sets out the case against what he calls the Dietary Fat Hypothesis for obesity and heart disease, and proposes instead the Carbohydrate Hypothesis: that both obesity and heart disease are caused by excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates, rather than dietary fat.
Taubes is very convincing. He explains how people have consistently recommended low-carb diets for weight-loss for the past 150 years. He explains how scientists roundly ignored studies that contradicted the link between high cholesterol and coronary disease. There are details of the mechanism by which eating refined carbohydrate affects insulin production, leading to obesity. He gives a plausible narrative for how the Dietary Fat Hypothesis came to be accepted scientific wisdom despite not actually being true (or supported by the majority of the evidence). He explains how studies of low-fat diets simply ignored overall mortality rates, reporting only deaths from heart disease, and how one study wasn't published because 'we weren't happy with the way it turned out'. All in all, the book is very convincing.
I expect a relatively large percentage of people on LW are already aware of this. Searching the LW archives for 'Taubes' gives several, mostly positive, references to his work (Eliezer seems to be convinced "Dietary scientists ignoring their own experimental evidence have killed millions and condemned hundreds of millions more to obesity with high-fructose corn syrup."). However, I do expect it to be news to some people, and I think it raises an important question. Given that everyone needs to eat something, we all need to decide whether we believe Taubes or whether we believe Change 4 Life.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is 601 pages of relatively small type, and contains 111 pages of references. Most of you probably don't want to read a book that long, and you definitely don't want to check all of it's references. Even if you did, Taubes openly admits that his book is attempting to argue for the Carbohydrate Hypothesis - he is trying to convince you, why should you be surprised if you find yourself convinced? (He claims not to be cherry-picking but then, he would, wouldn't he?) So how can you decide whether to trust the government or whether to trust some journalist with no training in biology? Even if you do decide to assess the evidence for yourself, how exactly should you go about it?
This is the key question of rationality. How can we believe what is true? And I think this makes a great case study - it's an area in which we all have to have a belief (or at least, act as though we have a belief) and one in which there is (or at least appears to be) genuine controversy as to what is true and what is not.
If you've already thought about this, do you believe Taubes' thesis, and how did you come to this conclusion? If this is the first time you've ever heard of Taubes, how far have you shifted your probability for the Dietary Fat Hypothesis based on reading this post? What more research do you intend to do to decide whether or not to continue believing it? How much weight do you place on the fact that I believe Taubes? On the fact that Eliezer believes Taubes (Eliezer, if your position is more nuanced than this, feel free to correct me)? How much did you update your beliefs based on what other commentors have said (assuming there have been any)?